Warmth
by LeopardFang
Summary: Stiles doesn't deal with the death of his mother very well. He's grieving, and guilty, and depressed.


Ch1- Warmth

Sorry if this doesn't make sense.

It's not very well written and it is very short but I haven't posted in ages so I went ahead and posted it.

Warnings for Depression and Self Harm

* * *

They say grief doesn't truly go away, but it does heal with time.

I don't know much about grief. It's confusing, unsettling, linked to closely with about a billion other emotions. I know that I feel it every day, and that I will continue to feel it for the rest of my life. It's not getting better. It hasn't been getting better. It won't _ever_ get better.

I know that it isn't like it was before, it's different, but not better. It's not the heart wrenching agony, where I can feel my heartbeat everywhere, and my eyes are constantly stinging, and I just want to stop existing. It's not as overwhelming, not taking over every single detail around me, not making every single thing look dark and dreary.

It's a different kind of grief. I'm more numb than hurt. As if I just felt too much and now I can't feel enough. The days all blur together, one after another, and I can't tell them apart. It's like they don't even happen, like my brain just can't register that I need to focus, that I need to register the world around me. This grief isn't better than before, it's worse, like my brain had finally accepted that she was really gone and there was nothing I could do. Because she was gone, and I couldn't function without her, couldn't live life like nothing had happened. I couldn't move on, it was impossible.

Grief is confusing.

Guilt is much simpler.

I know a lot about guilt. Guilt haunts me like a shadow, pointing out every single mistake that I make, one piling up on top of another until I'm more mistakes than anything else. It seemed like everything I did was wrong. That I couldn't do anything right. But no matter how much other guilt piled up, it was nothing compared to one single fact.

I had killed her.

Her death was on my hands.

I fell it every day, this guilt. It's my first thought when I wake up and my last thought before I fall asleep, and every thought in between. No matter what was happening, the fact I killed her stayed lodged in my mind. It came when I made myself stale chips or old leftover pizza or whatever happened to be in the fridge, and remembered how she would cook me food. When I got home from school to an empty house, and she wasn't there to ask me how my day went.

The guilt hurt me, but it destroyed my dad.

He fell into depression. Real depression. The kind that completely changes you, the kind that you can never truly recover from. He started drinking. Then drank some more. Then drank way too much. All the time. He spent less and less time at work and more and more time sitting at the kitchen table, staring off into space with a bottle of scotch.

He would talk to me about his feelings, pour them out to me all over the table. They were jumbled, and confused, but honest and full of agony. I never really knew what to say, never being one of those people who knew how to comfort people. So I mostly just sat there, let him pour out his heart to me.

I didn't tell him my feelings, didn't tell him about that sinking feeling in my chest, or every hitch of my breath, or how every second just blended together in one agonizing life. I couldn't. I didn't want to make his life even worse, I had to be strong for him, one of us had to be strong, or everything would fall apart. So I didn't tell anyone, just spent every day locked in my own secret, shackled down by depression, being tortured by guilt.

Roles reversed. Suddenly it was me taking care of him. I had to pry the scotch from his limp hands when he passed out, had to make sure he didn't choke on his own puke, had to make sure he ate enough. I had to take care of my own stuff, like school and food by myself. But I didn't mind. My dad was hurting and it was that simple.

He started to get better after a while, started drinking less and less, started going back to work. He started taking care of himself, and then started making sure I had food. But I just got worse. Before my feelings had been dulled out, to a sad medium. But now I felt even more numb, like my feelings had stopped all together, as if the grief and guilt were too much, so my brain just cut off emotions all together.

The next few years passed by in a bit of a blur, days all blending together. I couldn't remember most of it, as if depression had just decided to go and erase part of my life. I have snippets from those times, tiny moments that sometimes show up.

The first time was when I was washing dishes. I had been washing a plate, when my soapy hands slipped and it fell from my hands and shattered into a million pieces on the floor. I crouched down on the floor, knees crunching on pieces of glass when they hit the floor, and started picking up the glass. It was sharp, but I tried my best to avoid the edges. By the time every piece of glass was securely in the trash, my hands were quite cut up.

I raised my hands up and looked at them, saw the blood running down from tiny slashes on my skin. I stared at it for a bit, watching the blood run down my hands and then down my wrists in dark scarlet rivulets. I was struck with the knowledge some people bleed to help with grief. I blinked, watched the blood. I didn't feel the pain, I mean I felt it tug at the edge of my awareness, but I paid it no mind and it didn't bother me. I didn't feel any less numb, not really, this had no effect on me.

The second time was different, I had been cooking something on the stove. I don't remember many details, but I remember somehow burning myself. I remember that for one second, one single split second, all I could feel was the burning sensation in my hand. For one split second, the warmth overtook me, pain buzzed at the edge of my awareness, but the warmth was there, staining my hands and entering my blood and flowing all the way through me.

This was different then when I had sliced my hand. This helped. This helped a lot. I suddenly craved more, leaned down and put both my hands on the stove, burning them. I let the feeling wash over me, let it fill the emptiness in my chest, let it spark at my numb nerve endings.

That was a long time ago, but I kept burning myself, even now, I still burn myself. It's less frequent and I moved away from my hands, started burning my arms instead. It left marred flesh, blisters and skin a mix of red and white. It left pain every time my sleeves shifted, or I knocked my arm into something, or just any time at all, when phantom pain would just send my arms in ghostly pain.

I think overall I started to get worse. I think I got even more numb, sunk even deeper into grief, when every day passed and she didn't come back. But it was hard to tell if I was getting worse, hard to tell through the bursts of emotions, the bursts of warmth. I think people were starting to notice how I'd changed. How I'd become distant, and spaced out, and quiet. My dad definitely noticed, for he told me I needed to go somewhere, to get help.

He took me somewhere to. Some big building, with hospital like hallways, and nurses dressed in shades of white. I remember sitting down at a table, across from some women I didn't know, as she told me that she was going to tell me who I was. I remember reaching out, touching the table, fingers curling around the edge, feeling the cool metal with numb hands.

She labeled me with depression and gave me some pills.

The pills didn't help, if anything they just made it worse. They made me even more numb, more synthetic, more fake. I stopped taking them, threw them in the trash and went on with my life. If my life could even be considered living. But maybe I deserved that. Maybe I deserved for my life to be a living hell. I had killed her after all. Killed the person who meant the most to me.

So life went on like it had before, numb except for the burns. Except for the marred skin all over my arms. The good thing about burning is, at least at the low level I burn at, it doesn't leave scars. It leaves blisters, and skin a bright red. But not forever, only for days, sometimes weeks.

Then my dad found out.

I had just gotten back from school, dropped my backpack on the floor, and walked to the kitchen. I had waited all day for this, for that burning sensation, for that warmth. My dad was never home at this time, he always worked late, probably to avoid me as much as possible. I reminded him to much of her.

I had walked over to the stove, craving the heat, the warmth, the burn. I turned it on, pulled up my sleeves. Then placed my left wrist on the hot stove. It burned. A lot. The feeling washed over me, completely overwhelming, complete bliss.

"Stiles!" My dad yelled, reaching forward and jerking me away from the stove. I instantly missed the warmth, missed the heat, missed the searing of my flesh. He looked at my arms, gently took ahold of my wrist, saw the layers of burns, older ones covered with newer ones. He stumbled to the sink, dragging me along with him. He turned the cold handle all the way, and stuck my arm under it.

For years of not telling him how shattered I was. When he knew it really didn't change much. He took me to that place again, and I showed them my burns, and they just nodded and gave me more pills. I didn't take the pills. I knew they wouldn't help. I stopped burning my arms because I knew it upset my dad.

I started burning my legs instead. It was harder to do, I had to sit up on the counter and roll up my jeans, and then place my leg on the stove. But it was better then stopping all together. I don't think I could stop now, even if I wanted to. I was addicted to the sensation. It was easier to hide my legs anyway, a lot less suspicious in the summer then wearing long sleeves.

So nothing really changed. The days kept blurring, and my skin kept burning, and my heart kept beating.

Then one day everything changed, with one sentence my dad said, "We don't talk about her often, but whenever we do, you never call her mom."

I froze, heart stopping in my chest, eyes blown wide, panic crawling up in my chest. He was right. I didn't. I only said her or she. Never her name, never mom. "You are right."

"Why is that?"

I knew, but I didn't tell.

That was my own secret, the secret held closest to my heart.

No one would ever know that secret.

* * *

Yup. I'm ending it here.

Tell me if you liked it I guess.


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